We Danced On Our Desks: Brilliance and backstabbing at the Sixties' most influential magazine

Part One

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1

What’s a byline?

The letter came on May 11th, 1966, a month after my 23rd birthday. A creamy envelope with a London postmark and THE SUNDAY TIMES shinily embossed on its flap. No, I thought, it couldn’t be. It couldn’t possibly be …

It was.

Dear Mr Norman

I am delighted to tell you that you have won our Writers’ Contest. The cheque will follow in a few days.

Would you kindly telephone my colleague, Mrs Susan Raven, reversing the charges, so that we can find something out about you before we make the announcement.

Many congratulations

Yours sincerely

Godfrey Smith

Magazine editor

This early in the morning, the Northern Echo’s Newcastle-upon-Tyne bureau was deserted but for me and Anita, the receptionist-cum-switchboard operator. Editorial and Advertising had only three telephone lines between them and more often than not one picked up the receiver to hear ‘There’s noah line,’ in her plaintive Geordie accent.

‘Fuck me!’ I gasped, reading the letter again and then, seeing it really was true: ‘Fuck ME!’

I took Anita by a charm-braceleted wrist – each charm with a different story behind it - and waltzed her around the still-closed front office. She didn’t resist despite her surprise, and distaste for the forbidden word which the dramatic critic Kenneth Tynan had recently dared to utter on BBC television.

‘Whatever you’re so happy about,’ she protested mildly, ‘there’s noah need for that kind of language.’

How far I couldn’t expect to go in journalism had been made clear early in my first week with the Hunts Post, ‘the county newspaper for Huntingdonshire’, four and a half years earlier.

I was calling on a Methodist minister named the Reverend Brian Brown to collect news of his church’s recent activities, my heart already in my boots. Surprisingly, the Reverend was only a few years my senior and sporting a fashionable Tony Curtis haircut. He kindly asked all about me, soon discovering I’d arrived at the county paper for Huntingdonshire straight from school.

One question was whether I hoped to get to Fleet Street when my traineeship with the Hunts Post ended, three long years from now. When I said I did, he gave me a pitying look he must normally have reserved for conducting funerals.

‘I’d forget about that if I were you,’ he said. ‘Nowadays, no Fleet Street paper is going to look at somebody without a university degree.’

This was 1961, when only around three percent of British school leavers went on to university. My down-at-heel private school in Ryde, Isle of Wight, sent most of its brightest and best to Warsash Navigational College, the Forestry Commission, or the National Provincial Bank. But a thin trickle reached the country’s handful of, mostly Victorian, universities, belittlingly known as ‘redbricks’; and every few years, some prodigy would attain the thousand-year-old glory of Oxford or Cambridge. The names of this select company, at long intervals on the school’s honours boards (I particularly recall K.P. Please and W.M. McLachlan) resounded down the decades like warrior kings’ in the Norse sagas.

That I should try even for a redbrick had not occurred to any of my teachers, to either of my divorced but still warring parents nor – it goes without saying – to me. How could it with my father on the brink of bankruptcy at the end of Britain’s second-longest seaside pier?

In 10 years under his management, Ryde Pier Pavilion had seemingly been coerced into every role possible for a giant domed structure of slatted wood, half-a-mile out at sea. It had been in turn a roller-skating rink, a penny-in-the-slot arcade, a silver-service restaurant, and a rock ‘n’ roll joint, all without any profit visible to the naked eye. Its latest reinvention, as a self-service cafeteria by day and a dance hall by night (with Nick Olsen at the Compton Melotone electric organ), showed little sign of breaking the cycle.

On the face of it, making money with the Pavilion did not look difficult. Every summer in those days, vast numbers of holidaymakers came to the Isle of Wight, crossing the Solent by ferry to disembark at Ryde’s abnormally long pier. There being no other source of food or amusement at the pierhead, my father had an exclusive first opportunity to fleece them.

But with Clive Norman there were two major obstacles to success at the fleecing game. Firstly, having served as a Royal Air Force officer in the Second World War, he considered running a pier pavilion beneath him and despised the overwhelmingly working-class clientele and the things he was obliged to do for them – like judging knobbly knee contests or leading off the dancing of the Gay Gordons – with an intensity he barely troubled to conceal.

Secondly, the Pavilion’s labyrinthine premises included a pub named The First and Last because it could serve your first drink when arriving on the Isle of Wight and your last before departing. For Clive, unfortunately, there never seemed to be a last and he’d long since graduated from just a man who ‘liked his beer’ to full-blown alcoholic, although at that time almost no one in Britain used the word.

He was therefore more often to be found boozing in his own bar than supervising his large, itinerant workforce, the majority of which were robbing him blind. I knew by heart those lengthy monologues to total strangers about life with 57 Squadron at Upper Heyford and the riotous evenings in the officers’ mess that relieved the strain of their last mission: ‘…. everyone would get completely piddled, even the padre. They’d dip your bare feet in black paint, then lift you up to put your footprints on the ceiling. On mess-nights, you knew you were going to ruin an expensive dress-shirt…’

A decade after the War’s end, he still used RAF slang, like ‘Roger’, ‘Wilco’, ‘prang’ and ‘line-shooter’, called doctors ‘medics’ and young girls ‘popsies’ and, like the Dambusters’ leader, Guy Gibson, owned a Labrador with a name commonly given to black dogs in the 1950s but abhorrent and unprintable today.

Even at the height of summer and the Pavilion’s proletarian revels, he retained the persona of an officer and gentleman in his tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, unstiffened shirt collars and trousers as billowy as prewar ‘Oxford bags’. The heroic image was completed by his close-cut dark hair in a deep widow’s peak (cause by tight-fitting flying helmets, he said) and the near-angelic good looks that ought to have taken him so much further.

The Pavilion had been built in the 1880s as a theatre for concert-parties and minstrel shows, and still had its stage and two dressing-rooms connected by a narrow backstage passage. There a bundle of fly-fishing rods from Hardy’s of Pall Mall rolled up in green canvas stood in the seaweed-smelling twilight, awaiting the happy day when he could get off the pier, put knobbly knees and Gay Gordons behind him and return to the life of genteel country pursuits they had so rudely interrupted.

Meantime, he took care that no breath of vulgar showmanship should ever taint his dealings with his public. Around the Pavilion’s pink and grey frontage, powerful loudspeakers informed the crowds pouring from the ferries of amenities they might otherwise miss in their lemming-rush to dry land. He made these broadcasts personally, in a melancholy boom that gave ‘hot or cold meals, tea, coffee and light refreshments’ all the allure of casualty lists after the Battle of the Somme.

At school I was considered thoroughly disreputable since he had me working for him on summer term weekends as well as through the holidays, collecting dirty crockery in the cafeteria and tending bar in the First and Last when I should have been attending Founder’s Day church services or taking part in inter-house athletics.

My school uniform and equipment were in horrible disrepair, for I could never bring myself to add to the burden of the fees (‘Eighteen guineas a term,’ as he often reminded me) by demanding a new cap or PT clothes. On one soul-shrivelling occasion, the headmaster pulled me out of the lineup for the annual panoramic photograph of pupils and staff because mine was the only blazer among 200 without a badge on its breast pocket.

I took a crumb of comfort from being not quite the school’s shabbiest boy; in the class above mine there was another whom I thought a fraction more decayed-looking.

Classmates often asked if I actually lived at the end of the pier – a natural assumption since I went there every day, passing through its turnstiles and using its tramway without payment. But it was only Clive who made his home in the Pavilion, sharing one of its former dressing-rooms with the woman who used to be the skating teacher at our roller-rink. It was supposed to be a secret, although obvious to all his staff and pier-employees at both ends, from the tram conductors to the men who slid the wooden gangways on and off the ferries.

My own domestic situation on shore was almost as unconventional, for I lived with his widowed mother, my Grandma Norman, who sold seaside rock from a kiosk at the pier gates and, in contrast with his seaborne enterprises, made an almighty success of it.

But to Grandma Norman, the Kiosk (on which her presence naturally conferred a capital K) was more than a business, it was an obsession. Winter and summer, seven days a week, she opened it at eight each morning and didn’t close until nine at night or later. Tall and handsome in a gipsy-ish way, her pink nylon overall always left unbuttoned to reveal a Jaeger twinset and cameo brooch, she looked as out of place as Clive in the seaside hurly-burly – but for her, unlike him, it was an asset. ‘Mrs Norman, the rock lady’ was the most famous figure on Ryde Esplanade. The outsize personality that had once been entirely concentrated on me was now shared among taxi drivers and deckchair attendants, the endearments in a burbly West Country accent that had once been mine alone served out to each of her customers with their cigarettes or sweets:

‘Ten Weights, dear? … A quarter of Murraymints, love? … Two candyfloss, my duck? A box of Black Magic, duck? … Quarter-pound or a half?’

She never went anywhere but to and from the Kiosk, spending each 13-hour day there without need of television or radio. Other than at its three serving windows, her only socialising took place in a screened-off recess where she had a tiny sink, a gas ring and a deck chair nestling among the piled confectionery boxes in which she took an afternoon rest, still intensely aware of what her all-female staff, varying in number from one to four, were doing at the windows. ‘Maria!’ her voice would float out, extravagantly rolling the ‘r’. ‘Count the change back to the customer like I showed you, love.’

Back there she entertained the various sales reps for cigarettes, ice cream and the rock of which she sold 16 tons per summer, not only in sticks in various sizes but in the guise of kippers, apples, bananas and false teeth. There, too, on the one-burner gas ring she did her only cooking for me - enormous fried-bready breakfasts whose aroma wafted onto the Esplanade. Even then, she’d be constantly darting out to serve her early morning regulars; to her inquiry ‘And what can I get you, my duck?’ the reply was sometimes a wistful ‘Bacon and egg, please.’

This was the only time in the day when I could eat without guilt. My lunch and tea I had in the Pavilion cafeteria where Clive had not only invented hyperinflation two decades ahead of its time but pioneered the stingy concept of ‘portion control’.

Cheese and biscuits, for instance, were a triangle of Dairylea spread, a microscopic blob of butter and three Jacob’s cream crackers. One afternoon, in my adolescent ravenousness, I took my plate back to the counter and asked for an extra one. It was an offence of Oliver Twist proportion; with the disillusionment in his hazel-brown eyes that cut me deeper than his worst anger, he explained that every cracker I so thoughtlessly ‘wolfed down’ meant his losing a halfpenny in profit.

The last of the Kiosk’s staff would have gone home by 6.30, leaving Grandma Norman alone there, when she was always happiest. Not for at least another two hours would she ‘cash up’ - always a gratifying experience – then put on a Burberry raincoat, purchased in 1918, over her pink overall and push a wheeled basket the short distance around the corner to Five Castle Street, where we lived.

Castle Street was a sunless lane mostly consisting of goods-entrances to Esplanade cafes and ice cream parlours. Number Five had once been a pub whose name no one now remembered; a narrow three-storey building of sour yellow brick with a blistered dark brown front door, our quarters were on its first and second floors and the ground floor served as storerooms for the Kiosk’s stock.

Since it would already be around 9.30, she would go straight to bed, though not yet to sleep. The wheeled basket contained a couple of pint bottles of Guinness and among the shoe trees at the bottom of her wardrobe lurked a bottle of Booth’s gin and several small ones of Schweppes tonic water. She would spend the next hour or so sipping Guinness or gin and tonic in utter contentment, crunching cheese biscuits from an economy-size bag and reading a historical novel by Jean Plaidy or Margaret Irwin.

Five Castle Street had been my escape from boarding at Ryde School, which I’d been doing since my parents’ break-up with the hopelessness of a convict on Devil’s Island. At the time, all that had mattered was no longer being cold and hungry, beaten on any and every pretext and under constant attack for not having the right shoes. Grandma Norman called it ‘a safe haven’ – even though she herself had no need of such a thing - but the truth was that she regarded the Kiosk as her home and Castle Street merely as a place to sleep.

It bothered her not at all that the flat had neither bathroom nor hot running water and the only toilet was a doorless recess on the far side of the rear ground-floor room (which once must have been the pub’s saloon bar). True Victorian that she was, she believed that too many hot baths weakened you and that a cold water ‘wash-down’ from a basin and jug once a week or so did the job just as well. And instead of that long trek downstairs, there was what she called ‘the po’ or ‘the Edgar Allan’, supplemented by a dreadful chair arrangement known as ‘the commode’.

That and all other fixtures and fittings had been supplied by Miss Ball, a dusty little woman with wild frizzy hair and an educated accent, whose ‘antique’ shop, a few doors away, sold fruit and vegetables on the side. Rather than have to think about it, Grandma Norman took everything Miss Ball offered, even the stuffed hoopoe under a glass dome, the used nasal irrigation set and the four petrified wooden flower tubs.

Nowadays, the building as it was then would certainly be declared unfit for human habitation. The cellar was structurally dangerous, so permanently blocked off, and the ground floor, where the rock was stored, oozed with damp. Stray cats came in through the cellar and haunted the almost ceiling-high cardboard cartons of sugarified kippers and false teeth, adding the mouldy reek of their pee to the age-old mildew and grime.

I could never invite friends there or even say where I lived, if not the Pier Pavilion. When I started going out with girls, my worst nightmare was that one of them might see my top floor bedroom with its view of the pier slantwise; its bedside table (from Miss Ball) a slab of orange wood, rocky on two unmatching pairs of antelope-horns.

I looked so awful in my dilapidated, badgeless blazer that after school, for my walk down Ryde’s plunging hills to the sea front, I avoided busy Union Street and instead crept along parallel, unfrequented Union Lane, past the Mead Lawn Tennis Club, so enviably cool-looking and blissfully unconcerned with holidaymakers, boarding houses, beaches and donkey rides. When I arrived outside Five Castle Street, I used to look carefully both ways like a Resistance fighter in Nazi-occupied France until I was sure no one would see me slip through its blistered brown front door.

The late 1950s are remembered as an era of teenage rebellion but there wasn’t a drop of it in me. I believed in Clive and the way he did things with all my heart. Each Whitsun, the summer season’s official start, hope revived in me that this would be the one when the Pavilion made his fortune at last. It took me years to realise that with him in charge, all the sunshine and gullible crowds in the world would have been to no avail.

As I’d always done, I clung to Grandma Norman’s portrayal of him as a paragon of nobility – which his performance as a husband had not diminished – and a hard worker of Herculean proportion. ‘And he’s so worried financially,’ she would observe sadly yet again, although I felt sure she must be slipping him some of the profits on the Kiosk’s annual 16 tons of rock.

The chief manifestation of that nobility and hard work, of course, was his total enslavement to her: he sent salad lunches down from the Pavilion by tram every day for her and her helpers and, despite his myriad preoccupations at the pierhead, was always on call to replenish the Kiosk’s stock and do odd jobs there or at the flat.

Often, his care went much further. ‘He put a belladonna poultice on my back last night,’ I remember her telling me, sitting up in bed with her gin and tonic from the wardrobe. ‘And he took my shoes off for me and put my slippers on. He was so gentle … he’s like a woman!’ At the time, this did not seem at all unhealthy, just one more reminder of the impossibility of ever measuring up to him.

Five Castle Street was also home to my two-year-old sister, Tracey, who’d been in the custody of my mother, Irene, since the divorce but was turned over to Clive and Grandma Norman shortly after my liberation from boarding school. She’d been born when Clive had already absconded with the roller-skating teacher and he’d initially tried denying paternity even though, throughout all his infidelities, Irene had never so much looked at another man. But all that was forgotten when he saw Tracey, for she was the image of him in every way - every way that I wasn’t.

She was, indeed, a gorgeous child with a mass of tight golden curls and a smile that made strangers rhapsodise over her in the street. Neither her father nor grandmother being in a position to provide steady childcare, she was looked after by a series of women seconded from the Pavilion’s kitchen staff. Each evening, she was put down in Grandma Norman’s single bed, then awoken at Guinness-and-gin time and given fizzy pop and crisps, the genesis of a lifelong struggle with her weight.

Grandma Norman referred to her as ‘Baby’ in the Victorian manner – ‘Hush, you’ll wake Baby’ – sang her ancient nursery songs like ‘Nellie Bly caught a fly’ and apostrophised her ecstatically in the third person: ‘She’s her nan’s little bit of all right … her nan’s little bit of fluff … her nan’s little bit o’ cobbly cheese … there’s not a flaw in her … not a flaw in her.’ While this was going on, I could only watch sheepishly, conscious of all the flaws there were in me.

I had got into the habit of saying my prayers at boarding school, where it was the only sure protection against bullies and ‘homos’. Now, aged 13, I prayed that Tracey would grow up to be as big a success as her brother was a failure.

Both Clive and Grandma Norman talked incessantly about the past, especially the wondrous time known as ‘before the War’. Born at its height as I had been, I saw it as a great grey wall, shutting off all the colour and excitement of ‘history’ back through Queen Victoria, the Crimean War, the French Revolution, Cavaliers and Roundheads, knights in armour, Ancient Britons …I wished I’d been alive in many previous ages but above all the ‘Naughty [Eighteen] Nineties’ or ‘the Roaring Twenties’, whose frivolity and fun were at the furthest possible extreme from this drab postwar world-without-end.

Time always passes more slowly for the young but for me, in my absolute certainty of having nothing whatever to look forward to, it had a viscous feel, as if it might soon congeal into a complete stop. The approaching end of the Fifties and dawn of a new decade seemed to promise nothing beyond a six in place of a five.

Neither of them took any interest in my schoolwork, which I understood completely: what relevance could it have to struggling with a pier pavilion or shifting rock? Nonetheless in 1959, when I was 16, I managed to pass the General Certificate of Education in six subjects at Ordinary Level and went into the sixth form to do Advanced Level English and French. It wasn’t called studying those subjects but ‘reading’ them - the university expression, suggesting I was already as good as there.

The school ceased to regard me as a delinquent; I was made a prefect, took the lead in Shaw’s Arms and the Man and got into the rugby First Fifteen. Even my chronic shabbiness was slightly alleviated by a Rael-Brook drip-dry shirt in pale grey, acceptable to the uniform code, that I could wash every night and wear the next day.

During this time, Grandma Norman moved from her flat above the derelict pub at Five Castle Street to a slightly larger but equally squalid one above a derelict café at number Two. Ever enterprising, she turned the ground floor into a fish and chip shop, run for her by a young man named, if you can believe it, Mr Oxford. ‘Where there’s muck, there’s money,’ I remember her saying with a rosy wink over her bedtime Guinness.

The reek of frying batter inevitably rose to the flat and impregnated my clothes. In the sixth form there were only three of us doing A-Level English with the headmaster himself. One day when we were deep into King Lear’s storm scene, he suddenly sat upright like an alerted meerkat, sniffed the air and said, ‘Has someone been eating chips in here?’

I passed both A-Levels and at the end of my last term, in July 1961, was awarded both the English and Sixth Form prizes. The head’s final report spoke glowingly of my ‘responsiveness’ and ended: ‘If circumstances were other than they are, he might now be beginning a university course.’ That the school might have thought it worth trying to make circumstances other than they were – for instance by steering me to one of the Isle of Wight County Council’s generous and widely-bestowed grants for tuition and accommodation – naturally never crossed my mind.

Throughout my school career to the fifth form, I’d believed my sole talent to be drawing, especially caricaturing, and had always said my ambition was to become a cartoonist. Oddly enough, a possible alternative was first suggested by the teacher who most disapproved of me and my background, the elderly, bushy-browed geography master Mr Symonds, nicknamed ‘Sinbad’. Our homework had been an essay on the Scottish Central Lowlands, to which I’d added a detail gleaned from my wistful study of menswear advertisements - that the silk-producing town of Paisley was ‘noted for its startling ties’.

Sinbad tossed my exercise book back to me, slightly moderating his usual look of distaste, and said, ‘Have you ever thought of being a journalist?’

The prospect was far from attractive. Like William Boot in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, everything I knew about newspaper life had come from films – the incessant pressure and panic, the ranting editors and sackings on the spot. All the journalists I’d heard of had exotic names like Hannen Swaffer or Chapman Pincher or Sefton Delmer or Donald Zec that made them seem born to the profession. By contrast, Philip Norman, which I hated as much as every other bit of myself, sounded irredeemably weak and unconvincing.

With a sixth former’s intellectual pretensions, I thought I’d like to be a dramatic critic like The Observer’s Kenneth Tynan with his razor-edged prose and fearless use of taboo words like ‘sex’ and ‘constipation’. But no doubt he had walked into his job after a glittering career at Oxford or Cambridge.

The only source of information for someone at my level was a booklet entitled A Career in Journalism furnished by the Island’s education authority, which informed me I would need to learn shorthand and typing, be physically fit and have ‘an understanding wife’ because of the irregular hours. Its only illustration was a black-and-white photograph of a telephone box with a thin-faced, trench-coated, trilby-hatted man inside, dictating a story from the supposed scene of a fire. Nothing could have looked more utterly devoid of glamour.

Nonetheless, I wrote letters offering my services to the weekly Isle of Wight County Press, whose archaic front page consisted only of advertisements, and the Portsmouth Evening News, in which Clive had been a page lead in 1954 after drunkenly smashing up the mirror-lined bar of the Starboard Club in Seaview.

Both regretted they had no vacancies.

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As things turned out, I was to be given my start on the mainland some 200 miles away and owe it partly to Brussels sprouts and partly face cream.

The divorce judge had ordered Clive to pay Irene £5 per week maintenance (as well as to keeping me at Ryde School when he’d been all for the state sector) but the payments had quickly lapsed. Realising the futility of pursuing him and with no resources of her own, she’d had no alternative but to find a job.

Before our move to the Island, Clive had managed an 18th century coaching inn named the Cross Keys in St Neots, Huntingdonshire, Britain’s smallest county after Rutland. In reality, Irene had done most of the managing while he was out shooting or fishing the nearby River Ouse. Now she contacted the brewery which owned the Cross Keys on the off chance that his old job might be vacant and, by an extraordinary coincidence, it was.

One of Clive’s parting shots had been that at her age (42) no other man was going to look at her. But while running the Cross Keys she’d met a farmer called Gerald Davison who had 2,000 acres, mostly of Brussels sprouts, around the nearby village of Southoe and drove a two-tone Ford Zodiac, the first British car seriously to resemble an American one. (‘Thank you, God,’ I’d breathed in my prayers in Ryde School’s boarding house. ‘A rich man.’)

She’d subsequently joined the Elizabeth Arden company as a beautician, a job for which she had a natural talent. Obligingly, Elizabeth Arden assigned her to a circuit of its treatment salons in roughly the same area as Gerald Davison, rotating between Peterborough, Norwich and King’s Lynn. The constant travelling involved was why she’d handed back Tracey to Clive and Grandma Norman.

At Glass’s department store in Peterborough, she made up the face of a Mrs Sharman whose husband owned a string of weekly papers throughout western East Anglia. In the course of one such treatment, it emerged that his Huntingdonshire (traditionally shortened to ‘Hunts’) Post, was soon to have an opening for an ‘editorial trainee’. Such was Irene’s skill at minimising crows’ feet and waxing off superfluous hair that Mrs Sharman offered to mention me to him.

She kept her promise and, in the nick of time before leaving school, I was interviewed by the Hunts Post’s editor, F. J. Johnson, a ferocious-looking man with livid red cheeks and a drooping black moustache, who snarled rather than spoke. He made it clear that the interview was purely a formality, and I was being offered the job, now designated an ‘apprenticeship’. I would be given a six-month trial at three guineas (£3.30p) per week and, if satisfactory, indentured for three years, at their end taking the Proficiency Certificate of the National Council for the Training of Journalists.

‘You’ll have a chance to do a bit of sub-editing … bit of feature-writing,’ snarled Mr Johnson. I nodded eagerly despite having no idea what he meant. ‘You’ll also be expected to do things like fetching the chief reporter’s cigarettes and making the office tea.’ He smiled, perhaps recollecting his own apprenticeship but resembling the Devil gloating over souls in Purgatory. ‘It doesn’t do any harm…’

A week before I was due to start, Irene came to Ryde to drive me up to Gerald Davison’s farm, where I was to stay. Her reunions with Clive could be tense, for she was forthright in her criticisms of Tracey’s care and took every opportunity to rub in how far she now was from the life she’d led with him; the drinking and blatant womanising and finely-calculated humiliations and beatings-up.

This time, what was essentially the hand-over of me went quite smoothly; she didn’t make too much of her new navy-blue Harvey Nichols suit with matching two-tone shoes, and even managed to be polite to his mistress. In his pierhead pub, the First and Last, on the night before my departure, seven or eight Tavern ales reduced him to tears and he took £50 from the till and stuffed it into my breast pocket, as if in apology for that missing blazer-badge.

We left on the 8.30 ferry. Grandma Norman had to be in the Kiosk of course, but he emerged from his ‘secret’ backstage love-nest in the Pavilion to wave me off from its long wooden front steps. Looking back at the upraised arm, the widow’s peak and pale, ballooning trousers, I felt a sudden quiver in my throat.

‘I think he was still drunk when he woke up,’ my mother said, not totally without affection.

So it came about that, aged 18, I was a Hunts Post reporter, interviewing a woman named Grace Hicks, who had been deemed newsworthy for reaching the age of 92.

I was good at listening to old ladies after all those years of practice with Grandma Norman and returned to my desk to compose 800 words portraying my rather unremarkable, sweet-sucking subject as a ‘serene’ and ‘gracious’ personage whose stored-up wisdom in the ways of the world ‘I, a product of the jet age, secretly envied.’

The ferocious aspect and articulation of my new editor, F. J. Johnson, was matched by extreme violence of movement; every morning, he stamped up the stairs to his office like a man trying to put out a forest-fire by himself and slammed the door with a force that rattled windows.

I had watched him storm into the reporters’ room and snatch what I now knew to call my ‘copy’ from his in-tray, creasing the pages as if he held a personal grudge against them.

A few minutes later, he threw the door open again and gave me a glare verging on the homicidal. ‘Your first name,’ he snarled. ‘Do you spell it with one l or two?’

‘One,’ I replied faintly. I thought he must be writing to Mr Sharman, the paper’s owner,